A Year in Reading: Mai Al-Nakib

At the start of the year, a friend asked how I choose the books I want to read. He explained that he consulted reviews, bestseller lists, prize nominations, end-of-year lists, then compiled a detailed spreadsheet, and proceeded to read as many books as he could over the course of the year. My own method—if it can be called that—is the opposite of systematic. It’s almost as if the books I read choose me. I hear about a book from a friend or on the radio. A writer I like mentions another writer, and my interest is piqued. Or, as was the case with the first book I read in 2021, it might have been sitting patiently on my shelf for years, waiting its turn.

After our year of’s felt right. A book of elsewheres and movement, of yearnings for the ineffable, Barthes’s journal-like writing is interspersed with haunting photographs by . These lines stay with me: “Because ‘to read’ a land is first to perceive it through one’s body and memory, through the memory of one’s body. I believe the writer exists in this vestibule of knowledge and analysis: having more awareness than experience, aware of the very cracks in experience. This is why childhood is the anointed road on which we can best know a land. In the end, there is no Land other than the Land of Childhood.”